Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag

Author:John Kaag
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

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I can understand if exploring the stream of consciousness by way of psychedelics seems like a bad idea. Just because the eminently levelheaded Michael Pollan made exactly the same journey in his 2018 How to Change Your Mind doesn’t mean that everyone is going to follow suit. Thankfully, for more timid readers like me, there are ways other than laughing gas to get a better sense of the stream of consciousness, to let go enough to feel a bit of release, to experience the flow rather than the fixity of experience. Sometimes simply attending to the edges and breaks of experience is enough to bring on a “coming to consciousness.” Transcendent moments—whether you want to call them beautiful, or sublime, or genuinely divine—can occur after, or in the midst of great personal turmoil. It is as if something has been shaken free, the scales fall from our eyes, and we witness our surroundings as if for the first time. In truth, I suspect tragedy and turmoil have the unintended consequence of disrupting our habitual frames of perception, the instrumental ways that we typically interpret the world, just long enough for what James later called “pure experience” to make an entrance. Sometimes, it is precisely when one is laid low that momentary, but meaningful, insights have the chance to arise. “There is a crack in everything,” wrote Leonard Cohen, “that is where the light gets in.” And it gets in where you least expect it.

When my grandfather finally passed away, my small extended family gathered on a hill in a country cemetery in Exeter, Pennsylvania. It was August—humid and uncomfortable. We sat in silence for nearly twenty minutes “paying our respects.” Becca, who was four at the time, had fallen asleep in the car and I held her on my lap, with her warm flesh pressed against my own. I wasn’t crying because I missed Pop. He had Alzheimer’s and had been a complete monster for the better half of a decade. I still don’t know what the tears were, but they had to do with the little body, on top of mine, a onetime stranger who was now our lasting companion. This too would pass. The trees blew in the breeze and the water dripped off my nose into Becca’s hair. My mother sat at my shoulder. The afternoon light smelled warm and green and yellow and passed into a cool blue that coated my eyes and covered my face. “Are you okay? Are you going to pass out?” my mother asked. I just shook my head and later explained that I thought I was “coming to.”

In the year after my grandfather’s funeral, I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Spring. It is a brutally beautiful book, one in which tragedy occasionally gives way to what might be regarded as conversion of consciousness. In the lingering months of winter, Knausgaard’s wife overdoses on sleeping pills, and he narrowly (and haphazardly) saves her. But the months pass, and he writes,

Some days

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